Preparing for the Miraculous

100 eleven talksMargulis, in The Symbiotic Planet, sounds even moredraconian: “To me, the human move to take responsibilityfor the living Earth is laughable – the rhetoric of the powerless.The planet takes care of us, not we of it. Our self-inflatedmoral imperative to guide a wayward Earth or heal oursick planet is evidence of our immense capacity for selfdelusion.Rather, we need to protect us from ourselves. ...No human culture, despite its inventiveness, can kill life onthis planet, were it even to try. ... Humans are not the centreof life, nor is any other single species. Humans are not evencentral to life. We are a recent, rapidly growing part of anenormous ancient whole.”“It may already be too late to avert the looming climatecatastrophe that Lovelock warns about,” opines John Gribbin.And the senior biologist Edward Wilson, one of themost respected living scientists, concludes his analysis ofthe Gaia situation with this paragraph: “The juggernaut oftechnology-based capitalism will not be stopped. Its momentumis reinforced by the billions of poor people in developingcountries anxious to participate in order to sharethe material wealth of the industrialized nations. But its directionscan be changed by mandate of a generally sharedlong-term environmental ethic. The choice is clear: the juggernautwill very soon either chew up what remains of theliving world, or it will be redirected to save it. ... Humanityis in a final struggle with the rest of life.” 10Breakdown or breakthroughErvin Laszlo (°1932) is the founder and president of theClub of Budapest, “an informal association of creative [andfamous] people in diverse fields of human creativity”. TheClub is “dedicated to the proposition that only by changingourselves can we change the world,” or variously put: “A10 Edward Wilson: The Future of Life, pp. 156 and 43.